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The Source for Video & New Media

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Unplugging the Evil Twin, The Dismantler, and the Singer of Songs: A De-mediatization of Video Art

by Alissa Firth-Eagland

Canadian Theatre Review, Summer2006, no. 127

Firth-Eagland discusses the event Feats, might., an evening of live performances by video artists, which she curated for FADO in Vancouver, BC. The show included performances from Daniel Cockburn, Brian Joseph Davis and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, based on the criteria that they all had highly crafted on and off-screen personas. The article goes on to discuss the difference between live and private performances, and describes each of the performances. The author notes that the audience's relationship to the performer was reshaped by seeing them in person, rather than through the distancing mechanism of single-channel video. Firth-Eagland suggests that Feats, might. proposed a new way of addressing the relationship between performance and performative video art, concluding that all performative video carries with it histories of the artists of early work, and each of these pre-historic elements are present in the creation of performative video art.